28 days later

Matthew d’Ancona reflects on how far we have come since Boris Johnson addressed the nation and told us: “You must stay at home.”

It is an unforgettable image from modern cinema: Cillian Murphy, awoken from a coma after 28 days and dressed in looted hospital scrubs, looking with dazed horror from Westminster Bridge at a panorama of empty devastation; a world overturned, it soon transpires, by a deadly virus that has raged through the land while he slept.

Why this story?

I’m not sure why, but many of us have turned to apocalyptic movies and books in our lockdown. I couldn’t get Danny Boyle’s beautiful and tragic images from the opening of 28 Days Later out of my head. A man, alone in the dawn, wandering the streets of a deserted London.

And here we all are. Life only imitates art so far, but the images of an empty city, from Westminster Bridge to the Bank of England are now real. A city built for multitudes is echoing and desolate.

I thought Boyle’s images were a useful way to remind ourselves how very far we have come in such a short time, when the remarkable is greeted on a daily basis with an accepting shrug. I asked Matt d’Ancona to step back for a moment and reflect on a world transformed. David Taylor, editor

Now transplant such a figure to 20 April 2020: 28 days after Boris Johnson’s televised instruction for all Britons to “stay at home”. What would a person see from that same vantage point in the heart of London? A scene no less empty and deserted; an unrecognisable cityscape.

Danny Boyle’s blood-soaked horror classic 28 Days Later (2002) is scarcely a work of literal prophecy. Zombies do not stalk our cities – the coronavirus pathogen is an invisible foe – and, if police records are any guide, most forms of violence have declined significantly during the lockdown.

Yet the pace of change portrayed in the movie finds an uncanny echo in all that has happened to us since Monday 23 March. Indeed, how easy it is to forget – sequestered as we are in our homes – the sheer scale of the transformation that has unfolded in less than a month.

Was there ever a time when we were not told to keep two metres apart? Or when we did not wash our hands compulsively, singing ‘Happy Birthday’ (or nearest equivalent) twice? When did surgical masks stop being an eccentricity reminiscent of Michael Jackson and become as commonplace as a scarf in winter?

On our screens, we have watched a ghastly show-reel of loss and bereavement. A 13-year-old schoolboy, Ismail Mohamed Abdulwahab, from Brixton, south London, died in King’s College Hospital on 31 March, his family forbidden from being with him when he died and from attending his funeral; on 12 April, a heavily pregnant nurse, Mary Agyeiwaa Agyapong, 28, died at Luton and Dunstable University Hospital (her baby survived and is doing well); countless older couples have died within days of each other, such as Valerie Williams, 74, who passed away in Warrington the day after the funeral of her husband, Hefin, 80.

In such circumstances, as tragedy risks becoming routine, we quickly lose our moorings and our perspective. When Matt Hancock, the health secretary, announced on 15 April that there would be a “right to say goodbye”, enabling families to see relatives in care homes before they die, it seemed like a special dispensation – rather than something we took for granted until only a few weeks ago.

As the virus has swept through intensive care units and residential facilities, claiming many hundreds of lives a day, so the world outside these sorrowful places has changed in almost every respect.

Day 1 Tuesday 24 March The Tokyo Olympics are postponed until 2021. Oxford University research suggests that up to half of the nation might have already contracted coronavirus.

Fundamental common law liberties such as freedom of association and movement have been signed away in an emergency act that will remain in force for two years (with reviews only once every six months).

The police now have powers to stop you leaving your home “without reasonable excuse”. They can break up a gathering of more than two people. They have claimed the right – not obviously reflected in the letter of the law – to stop you travelling to a favoured site for daily exercise or to walk the dog.

Are they over-reaching? As important as it is, that is not the core question. Before lockdown, the default position was that we could go where we pleased, and associate with one another as we liked, unless the law specifically said otherwise. Now the onus is on us to prove to the police – and, ultimately, the criminal courts – that our movements and meetings are “reasonable” under the Coronavirus Act 2020.

What is striking is the meekness with which all this was accepted by Parliament: a remarkable contrast to the furious rows of the past, over (for instance) the many anti-terror measures that have been proposed since 9/11. Not this time: the Government’s bill went through more or less on the nod.

Day 2 Wednesday 25 March Prince Charles tests positive for the coronavirus. UK Parliament closes after passing the Coronavirus Bill. Public Health England raises hopes by suggesting mass home testing could be available within days.

To borrow one of Tony Hancock’s best lines, one wonders if Magna Carta died in vain. But that is not what the public is wondering. The polls show that – at least for now – it is overwhelmingly supportive of the lockdown, and of the withdrawal of these fundamental freedoms.

And perhaps this is not so surprising. For freedom, as an abstraction, tends to be a lesser priority when people are worried about putting food on the table, making rent and avoiding eviction.

Day 3 Thursday 26 March At 8pm, in an act of togetherness, millions of Britons stand on their doorsteps and in their gardens to clap for those working on the frontline in the fight against the coronavirus. Chancellor Rishi Sunak announces a scheme to help the self-employed.

It is much too early to say whether the Office for Budget Responsibility is right to envisage the shrinkage of the economy by 35 per cent and two million more people on the dole.

Again, however, the stakes are more fundamental: there is no precedent for what the Government has done, which is, essentially, to switch off the economy. Whole sectors of business have been closed down entirely.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak has made millions more people dependent upon state support, effectively nationalising huge sections of the economy. More than nine million workers are expected to be “furloughed” under his job retention scheme. A further 1.2 million signed up for universal credit between the PM’s lockdown announcement and 9 April.

Day 4 Friday 27 March Coronavirus hits at the heart of government as Johnson and health secretary Matt Hancock both test positive, while chief medical officer Chris Whitty goes into self-isolation after showing symptoms.

What will happen when the government tries to wean UK plc off this mechanical ventilation, jump-starting the system with its monetary and fiscal defibrillator? Will the economy’s vital signs recover quickly, or not? That, at least, is one of the known unknowns that are, or should be, giving us sleepless nights. Whatever exit strategy the Government finally chooses from lockdown, it will lead to a space of profound insecurity.

Already, the familiar rhythms of life have been utterly disrupted, with no guarantee that they will smoothly resume their pre-lockdown beat.

Day 5 Saturday 28 March The Italian death toll passes 10,000, while the British toll hits 1,000. NHS England says that the UK would “do well” to keep the toll below 20,000.

The nation’s schools and universities are closed indefinitely, accessible only to a tiny minority of pupils and students. Yet, for a measure of how quickly habituated we have become to dramatic change, consider the cancellation of this year’s public examinations.

Since their introduction in 1951, A levels, in particular, have been the defining moment of the British educational cycle: the culmination of 13 years at school, the entry ticket to university, and (generally) the portal to a middle-class career.

Day 6 Sunday 29 March Amged El-Hawrani becomes the first frontline UK hospital worker to die after testing positive for the coronavirus. A 108-year-old Spanish flu survivor also dies from the virus. Text of Johnson’s letter released, in which he will warn British households that “things will get worse before they get better”.

The comparative nonchalance with which the education secretary, Gavin Williamson, announced on 18 March that teenagers would not be sitting these exams (or GCSEs) was simply breathtaking. Yes, there is a serious conversation to be had in the months ahead about whether we really need the structure of all-or-nothing tests that, in modern times, has been the bedrock of our qualification systems.

But, for now, there is simply a yawning gap in the 2020 educational calendar – a space that was once stuffed full of expectations, anxieties and plans, all now vaporised.

Day 7 Monday 30 March Professor Neil Ferguson says that the spread of the coronavirus is showing early signs of slowing in the UK. Amazon rainforest indigenous leaders warn that the disease poses an “existential risk” to them.

For the best part of a month, extraordinary moments such as Williamson’s speech have become almost routine: the heir to the throne testing positive for Covid-19; the Excel Centre in east London – a venue for the London Olympics in 2012 – transformed into a Nightingale Hospital, with space for 4,000 beds, in only nine days; the Prime Minister’s life almost snuffed out by the very disease against which he had been leading the charge.

What made it possible for us to get used so quickly to such transformative change? Mark Earls, the acclaimed author of Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature, tells me that what behavioural economists call “redesigning the decision landscape” is initially exhausting, but made possible by enforced practice, and (crucially) the human impulse to imitate.

“Compliance with the lockdown guidelines is made much easier by the fact that most other people are falling in line,” he says. “Our residential streets are noticeably quieter – Camden Town’s birdsong is the loudest I remember it. The media are showing us the ghostly emptiness of Oxford Street and the like. The few people we do see on the streets when we venture out are either muffled or masked and alone or in pairs or small family groups.”

Day 8 Tuesday 31 March A 13-year-old boy becomes the UK’s youngest victim of the coronavirus. The United Nations calls the pandemic the most challenging crisis since World War Two.

And at the heart of all this a bleak paradox: a struggle that requires us to act together by staying apart, to find solidarity in disaggregation. We express our camaraderie through the social discipline of the wide berth, meeting online or not at all, scurrying out of our hutches on Thursday evenings at 8pm to applaud the NHS and then scurrying back like mice in the lab, fearful of an electric shock if we stay out too long.

Day 9 Wednesday 1 April The Edinburgh Festival Fringe and Wimbledon tennis championships are cancelled, the latter for the first time since World War Two. The government lifts its 15 per cent cap on NHS staff testing after it emerges that only 2,000 out of 500,000 frontline NHS England workers have been tested.

We have been here before, or so it seems to me. Not in real life, or in our reading of history, but in the neural patchwork of our collective imagination: there, in the grey zone of memory and emotion, we oscillate between shock at the mutating landscape of the pandemic, and a patchy recognition that much of this was, indeed, foretold.

If anything has prepared us for this, it is not public policy, or lessons learned from previous epidemics, or data charts, or operational drills in Whitehall. It is the fragments of culture that we have absorbed as fantasy, but now understand afresh as inadvertent prophecy.

There is, of course, the dystopian fiction of JG Ballard, suddenly made real in the empty streets, enforced isolation, and high-rise neurosis of the Covid-19 world.

There is the perilous loneliness of grief, making do and moving on, so brilliantly described in Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road. And there is the shimmering prospect of radically new surveillance technology – apps and barcodes that may govern the post-lockdown world – reminiscent of both Blade Runner movies or Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

Day 10 Thursday 2 April In a single week, the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits soars to 6.6 million. Before coronavirus, the record weekly high was just 695,000. Hancock sets out an aim for the UK to carry out 100,000 coronavirus tests a day by the end of the month.

Pop culture, too, has played its part. The infected do not roam the land – but 10 seasons of AMC’s television hit, The Walking Dead, have been an unexpected preparation for life after a game-changing crisis (a study in the human urge to collaborate and be decent versus the powerful forces that seek to thwart this instinct). Even Stephen King’s 1978 blockbuster novel, The Stand – which takes as its premise a pandemic that wipes out most of the world’s population – now seems less like a wildly implausible thought experiment.

Refracted through this lens constructed of cultural shards, the new world is both familiar and alien. The media fizzes round the clock with what Saul Bellow called “crisis chatter”, fed by the daily press briefings in Downing Street.

Day 11 Friday 3 April The NHS Nightingale Hospital in the ExCel centre opens in east London, having been fully transformed from an events space into a temporary field hospital in just nine days.

Yet at a deeper, more authentic level we are gripped by a sort of aphasia: a collective inability to speak with confidence about the sudden knock of history at every door in the land.

According to legend, when the 16th-century conquistador Francisco Pizarro drew close to the shores of South America, the indigenous peoples were so traumatised by the size and alien nature of his ships that they saw only inexplicable ripples in the ocean.

Historically accurate or not, this story communicates a deeper truth about the capacity – or incapacity – of human beings to absorb and cope with dramatic, unexpected change; especially, as in this case, when it involves a daily death toll that is hard to comprehend, let alone accept.

Day 12 Saturday 4 April China observes a three-minute silence for patients and doctors killed by the coronavirus. Keir Starmer assumes office as the new Labour leader.

The British reflex is to reach, off the shelf, for military language. It has long been natural to us – if horribly clichéd – to speak of the “Blitz spirit” in all situations of adversity. The wards where NHS staff labour round the clock in protective gear (when they can get it) to save lives, or at least to make death bearable, are universally described as the “front line”. The PM has said often that “we must act as a wartime government”, and is reportedly keen to announce some relaxation of the lockdown before the bank holiday on 8 May, the 75th anniversary of VE Day.

As the playwright Sir David Hare has noted, every generation since conscription ended in 1963 has dealt with “the absence of war” by seeking its own proxy conflict. As an example of this trope, the “war on coronavirus” is a natural. It is also a means of simplifying something that is horribly complex, of unknowable duration, and utterly capricious in its impact.

Day 13 Sunday 5 April The Queen delivers her “We will meet again” address to the nation, only the fifth special address in a 68-year reign. An hour later the prime minister is admitted to hospital after several days of persistent symptoms.

But there is still a broad streak of denial in our collective response to the pandemic. The appetite for an exit strategy from this lockdown is perfectly understandable – provided nobody expects the exit to lead straight back to the place we left on 23 March. And I think that, privately at least, many do expect that.

Much of what has been presented on social media as a profound personal revelation, or a life-changing behavioural shift, is merely modest experimentation masquerading as something else. Zoom calls, learning the violin, catching up with classic novels you never got round to reading, perfecting your chorizo bolognese: these are evidence of denial, not acceptance.

Day 14 Monday 6 April Johnson is moved into intensive care after his symptoms worsen; foreign secretary Dominic Raab takes on his duties. The UK death toll passed 5,000. China records no new coronavirus-related deaths for the first time since late January.

For the vast majority of people, lockdown is a nightmare to endure, not a surreal sabbatical. Deaths from domestic abuse have tripled: the group Counting Dead Women believes that 16 killings have taken place since the lockdown began, more than three times the usual rate for such a period.

Though overall crime has fallen, there have been 178,000 reported incidents of anti-social behaviour in the past four weeks, an increase of 59 per cent year-on-year.

Day 15 Tuesday 7 April The global coronavirus death toll passes 75,000. A number of French cities declare face masks mandatory. The Italian government calls its seaports “unsafe” in an apparent attempt to prevent rescue boats from disembarking migrants.

As Mark Earls observes: “This will end up being as much a mental as a physical health pandemic – human beings are not built to live in isolation, to live in small cells, not being able to trust strangers.”

Food banks are barely able to keep pace with the demand for basic sustenance among newly-impoverished families. In spite of a theoretical ban on new evictions, the firms that handle the removal of people from their homes are taking on extra staff to deal with existing notices and those postdated to June. Charities and other organisations that help disabled people say that the care network is perilously close to collapse.

Day 16 Wednesday 8 April China finally lifts its 76-day lockdown on Wuhan, the original epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak, which is widely thought to have come from a “wet market” in the city selling meat, fish and fresh produce.

Yes, it is cause for celebration that one million people have volunteered to help the NHS in its hour of greatest need. But cautious optimism about the “new communitarian spirit” should be tempered by a flinty realism about the strains to which the basic social fabric is now subject. With good reason, JG Ballard defined epidemiology as “catastrophe theory in slow motion”.

These 28 days have not been an interlude before the gradual resumption of business as usual: they are the slip-road to something new.

Looking back on the past month, I am haunted by Raskolnikov’s delirium on his sick-bed at the end of Crime and Punishment: “…the whole world was condemned to a terrible new strange plague that had come to Europe from the depths of Asia. All were to be destroyed except a very few chosen…. Men met in groups, agreed on something, swore to keep together, but at once began on something quite different from what they had proposed. They accused one another, fought and killed each other. There were conflagrations and famine. All men and all things were involved in destruction.”

In isolation, such visions are more potent than usual. The experience of these weeks has been one of sensory overload but also of existential anxiety. The questions which have gnawed away at us reflect our collective inability to see over the much-discussed “peak” of the death toll. What will the valley below be like?

Day 18 Friday 10 April The global death toll surpasses 100,000. Sarah Gilbert, an Oxford University vaccinology professor, announces that she is “80 per cent confident” the vaccine being developed by her team would work and says that it could be ready by September.

Alex Evans, founder of the Collective Psychology Project and author of The Myth Gap, frames this sensation well: “The grief we feel about coronavirus isn’t just because so many are dying: it’s also because at some level we know a way of life is passing too. Many things will never go back to normal. Grieving for that is both natural and necessary. But as well as mourning what we’re losing, it’s important that we pay attention to what’s being born. History shows us again and again how cataclysms lead to extraordinary renewal – from how the Black Death led to the Renaissance and the Reformation, to how World War II led to the postwar welfare state, the NHS, and the United Nations.”

Day 19 Saturday 11 April The UK government pledges £2m to domestic abuse charities. The number of deaths in the US overtakes Italy, and hits 20,000 the following day.

But an enlightened outcome is scarcely assured. “We’re now fluttering between two scenarios,” Evans says. “A breakdown in which we turn on each other and the crisis becomes a catastrophe for health, prosperity and our ability to tackle existential challenges like climate change, or a breakthrough in which coronavirus becomes the spur for collective action on a scale we’ve never seen before. Which scenario we end up in depends largely on what goes on in our minds, and above all whether we see ourselves as part of a Larger Us, a them-and-us, or just an atomised ‘I’.”

Day 20 Sunday 12 April The UK becomes the fifth country to record 10,000 deaths relating to coronavirus. Johnson is discharged from hospital and thanks the NHS, saying: “I owe them my life.” In Italy, classical singer Andrea Bocelli performs an Easter concert in Milan’s empty Duomo cathedral.

As in all moments of release – VE Day, the fall of the Berlin Wall – the end of the lockdown will be marked with a burst of human energy. What is uncertain is how that energy will be expended; in the service of what ideals or demons it will discharge itself.

In her classic essay on AIDs as a metaphor, Susan Sontag argued that rampant disease tends to have reactionary consequences. “Self-interest now receives an added boost as simple medical prudence,” she wrote. “All rapid epidemics, including those in which there is no suspicion of sexual transmission or any culpabilizing of the ill, give rise to roughly similar practices of avoidance and exclusion… the illness is such a perfect repository for people’s most general fears about the future.”

Day 21 Monday 13 April As new coronavirus cases continue to fall, Spain begins to loosen restrictions with some non-essential workers allowed to return to work. US President Donald Trump gives a press conference where he plays heavily edited video clips praising his coronavirus response.

And this is true. Covid-19 has reminded us that the NHS and social care system would collapse overnight without immigrant staff – a point which the prime minister made in his very personal video tribute on 12 April to two nurses, “Jenny from New Zealand” and “Luis from Portugal”. who watched over him in intensive care at St Thomas’ Hospital as he fought for life (unnerving coincidence – Cillian Murphy awakes from his coma in the same hospital in 28 Days Later).

Day 22 Tuesday 14 April The Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts that the UK economy could shrink by 35 per cent in a single quarter, with 2 million job losses. Italy sees its lowest increase in infections in a month. Trump cuts off US funding to the World Health Organisation while his country conducts a “review” into its conduct.

But let us not get ahead of ourselves. Coronavirus – like many pandemics before it – has already nurtured all manner of chauvinisms. Even before lockdown, Britons of Chinese descent were experiencing heightened xenophobia, especially on public transport.

Travel bans and border closures are now the norm, rather than the exception. And there is a new taste, especially on the Right, for economic nationalism and self-sufficiency: a surefire route to perdition, as the 1930s showed to cataclysmic effect.

Day 23 Wednesday 15 April Britain’s health secretary indicates that he wants to change hospital rules so people have “chance to say goodbye” to loved ones dying with coronavirus.

Conspiracy theories, too, have gained rapid traction in the past 28 days, as they invariably do in times of crisis: notably, the baseless claim that Covid-19 is caused by 5G technology. Dr Tanya Filer, of Cambridge University’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy, tells me that the soil will be ripe for witch-hunts and pseudo-science.

“Current circumstances have given 5G conspiracy theories a new, expanded lease of life, because these kinds of narratives flourish in conditions of uncertainty. They fill voids in evidence and understanding with a narrative that comfortingly, for their believers, leaves no question unanswered and no dot unconnected. The sense of powerlessness that many people are feeling today may also help the spread of conspiracy theories.”

Day 24 Thursday 16 April UK government confirms lockdown will be extended for “at least the next three weeks”. New York shutdown extended until May 15.

The global scientific challenges ahead, Filer warns, will invite irrational pushback, weaponised by social media. “Given low levels of trust in medical research, it would not be surprising to see a proliferation of anti-science conspiracy theories over the coming months. Just as conspiracy theories quickly came to surround the flu vaccine and zika vaccine development, as vaccine development for Covid-19 picks up pace, it may increasingly become a focus of attention. When such beliefs are strongly held, it can be difficult to get believers to change their minds, even when presenting them with accurate information.”

Day 25 Friday 17 April China’s GDP shrank 6.8 per cent in the first three months of 2020, the first quarterly contraction since they began publishing data in 1992. World’s biggest trial of drugs to treat Covid-19 patients has been set up in the UK, with 5,000 patients in 165 hospitals. Donald Trump used social media to encourage anti-lockdown protestors, some of them carrying weapons, in states where governors have imposed restrictions.

Powerful forces are ranged against the better angels of our nature, and we sense this with gathering dread. But the news from the lockdown is not all bad.

We have learned that there was housing available for rough sleepers all along. In neighbourhood groups and voluntary networks serving the vulnerable, we have seen the birth of something like David Cameron’s “Big Society”, four years after he left office.

Day 26 Saturday 18 April Lady Gaga brought together a massive global line up of music and entertainment stars for the Together at Home live-stream benefit show with Global Citizen and the World Health Organisation. The Rolling Stones performed together from four different locations, Stevie Wonder, Billie Eilish, Sir Paul McCartney, Taylor Swift, Jennifer Lopez and Pharrell Williams all joined in.

We have witnessed the remarkable enterprise and innovation of businesses called upon to build equipment for the health service, and the creation of new mega-hospitals in little more than a week. We have, let us hope, acknowledged once and for all that the stain on the nation’s conscience that is social care must be addressed, with thought, will and money. We have watched former champions of the minimal state make the case for something close to a universal basic income: necessity has been the mother of invention and the solvent of decayed ideology.

Day 27 Sunday 19 April New reporting from the Sunday Times reveals that Boris Johnson missed five meetings of the Cobra emergency committee when it was discussing the Covid-19 crisis in January and February. “Calls to order protective gear were ignored and scientists warnings fell on deaf ears,” the report finds.

For me, the mirror-image – and book-end – to Raskolnikov’s nightmare is the speech of Prior, afflicted by AIDs but determined to survive, delivered before the fountain of Bethesda in New York’s Central Park, that concludes Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America: “This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away…. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come…. More Life. The Great Work Begins.”

Day 28 Monday 20 April Global coronavirus deaths have passed 160,000 and more than 2.3 million people have been infected, according to Johns Hopkins University. More than 4.5 billion people – 58% of the world’s population – are living under lockdown. In the UK, 28 days on from the prime minister’s “stay at home” message, more than 16,000 people have died in hospitals and an estimated 4,000 more in care homes.

More life. Great work. These are daunting but appealing prospects for a nation awaiting release from its confinement.

But for now, like a solitary person in the chilly dawn, surveying an empty bridge, we face challenges enough in getting through the next 28 days.

All photographs Getty Images

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